ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(evaluations)

By A. Gunder Frank. February 1998

Referee summaries and evaluations

The book is a plea for global studies as a general historical
proposition, notably the argument of the centrality of Asia for the
period 1400-1800, and the rejection of the entire Eurocentric analysis
of incorporation, 1500 and all that. This can be a landmark book that
shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next
generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact.

Mark Selden, State University of New York

This is a bold new interpretation that creates a distinctive argument
to explain Europe's post-1800 successes. The author places his
argument in an even longer-run perspective to suggest that Europe's
‘rise’ may be just a temporary one bracketed on either
side by eras of Asian dominance. It departs from virtually all other
‘global’ or ‘world’ system perspectives by
arguing that Europe was not the central location of economic dynamism
in the early modern world (1400-1800) and therefore that
‘capitalism’ was not a unique cultural phenomenon that can
explain the differential economic success of Europe over Asia. The
author redefines our baseline for assessing the ‘rise’ of
Europe. I believe this book could become a benchmark study.

Bin Wong, University of California at Irvine

The book moves to argue that almost all received social theory is
wrong, since it a) directs our attention to supposedly unique features
of European society that were actually neither very unusual nor of
much importance in explaining the divergent development paths, and b)
directs our attention away from [these and to] attempting analysis at
the global level, which the author claims is by far the most
illuminating place to look for explanations of what may at first seem
like regional differences. This will be an extremely important book
of sufficient originality and importance ... at the intersection of
several important literatures [to] have a major impact. It could not
be more ambitious.

Kenneth Pomeranz, Univesity of California at Irvine

The greatness of this book is that it touches a number of intellectual
nerves [with] an important thesis that will generate much discussion
and intellectual debate because it forces a rethinking. There is no
directly competing book. No other work both provides the exhaustive
documentation and the theoretical clarity and conviction of
thesis. You get the feel of the interconnectedness of the world in a
way ... not felt before and the reminder that according to all
received theory this is not supposed to be so. That is the power of
this book....

Frank gained his world wide fame by making an argument that caused a
revolution in thinking about Third World Development. Well, the same
thing is about to happen again, except this time the stakes are much
higher. Now it is the theories of the endogenous nature of change in
the West that is being challenged. The Wallersteinian world economy
did not give rise to the world-system, Frank argues, but the
Afroeurasian world system gave rise to the European world economy. To
correct the historical fact is to challenge the theoretical
scaffolding of everyone from Marx to Weber to Braudel to
Wallerstein. Frank's point is that they simply got it wrong. [He]
turns on their heads many of the received assumptions about the origin
of the modern world system/economy. The book is that conceptually
important.

Albert Bergesen, University of Arizona

A work of highest intellectual, social and moral importance.
Specialists will welcome the forcefulness, verve, and coherence of
Frank's BIG PICTURE. Much of it will be completely new to many other
historians and social scientists who will have to change their views
and rewrite their lectures after they read it.

Anonymous publisher's referee

AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT

This book outlines and analyzes the global economy and its sectoral
and regional division of labor and cyclical dynamic from 1400 to
1800. The evidence and argument are that within this global economy
Asians and particularly Chinese were preponderant, no more
"traditional" than Europeans, and in fact largely far less so.
The historical documentation poses an ‘emperor has no
clothes’ challenge to all received Eurocentric historiography
and social theory from Montesquieu, Marx and Weber, or Toynbee and
Polanyi, to Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. The books's global
economic analysis offers a more holistic theoretical
alternative. Cite>The Rise of the West was not due to any
‘European Miracle exceptionalism’ that allegedly permitted
it to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as Weberians have
contended. Nor did Europe build a ‘European world-economy around
itself’ a la Braudel and thereby as per Marx and Wallerstein [as
well as my own WORLD ACCUMULATION 1492-1789] initiating a European
centered ‘Modern Capitalist World-System’ primarily by
exploiting the wealth of its American and African colonies. Instead,
Europe used its American silver to buy itself marginal entry into the
long since existing world market in Asia, which was much larger, more
productive and competitive, continued to expand much faster until
1800, and was able to support a rate of population growth in Asia that
was more than double that of Europe until 1750. Then changing world
economic/ demographic/ ecological relations and relative factor prices
in the competitive global economy resulted in the temporary
‘Decline of the East’ and the opportunity for the also
temporary ‘The Rise of the West’. Europe took advantage of
this world economic opportunity through import substitution, export
promotion and technological change to become Newly Industrializing
Economies after 1800, as again happening today in East Asia. That
region is now REgaining its ‘traditional’ dominance in the
global economy, with the Chinese ‘Middle Kingdom’ again at
its ‘center.’

CHAPTER SUMMARY

The introductory Chapter 1 suggests that received historiography and
social theory fall seriously short of what we need. Marx and Weber or
Parsons and Rostow and their many disciples are far and away too
Eurocentric, and Braudel and Wallerstein also are still not nearly
holistic enough. None of them is able, or even willing, to address the
global problematique, whose whole is more than the sum or its
parts. Chapter 2 outlines the productive division of labor and the
multilateral trade framework, as well as the sectoral and regional
inter-connections within the global economy. Chapter 3 signals how
American and Japanese money went around the world circulatory system
and provided the life blood that made the world go round. Chapter 4
examines the resulting world population, productive,income and trade
quantities, the related technological qualities and institutional
mechanisms, as well as how several regions in Asia maintained and even
increased their global preponderance therein. Chapters 5 and 6 propose
a global marcohistory that treats the Decline of the East and the Rise
of the West as related and successive processes within and generated
by the global world economic structure and dynamic. Chapter 6 inquires
how Asia's world economic advantage between 1400 and 1800 turned to
its disadvantage and to the [temporary] advantage of the West to face
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. World-encompassing macro- and
micro-economic analysis is used to account for The Rise of the West in
global instead of the received Eurocentric terms. The concluding
Chapter 7 then builds on the historical evidence and argument of this
book to derive theoretical conclusions about how to analyze this
global whole. Only a globally holistic analysis can permit a better,
indeed any even minimally satisfactory, comprehension of how the whole
world economic structure and dynamic shape and differentiate its
sectoral and regional parts East and West, North and South. Recourse
to a more holistic global historiography and social theory suggests
how Asian, and particularly Chinese, predominance in the world economy
through the eighteenth century presages its return to dominance also
in the twenty-first century.